OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Social Media App Usage in Relation with PHQ-9 Depression Scores during the COVID-19 Pandemic
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2022
Year: 2022

With about 300 million affected people, major depressive disorder (MDD) is one of the most common diseases worldwide. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of cases increased even further, by 28%. Many factors may be correlated with MDD, including the excessive use of social media apps. In this paper, we investigated the relationship between the use of social media and communication apps and depressive symptoms during the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic and social distancing like lockdowns probably changed smartphone usage times and usage patterns. While previous studies have shown an association between depression and social media usage, we report about the situation during these special circumstances.We employed a log-linear regression to examine the association of social media and communication app usage and depression. To quantify the usage, we applied the total usage time in hours of social media apps (e.g., WhatsApp, Facebook) as well as communication apps (Phone and Messaging) within one week. To measure depressive symptoms, we used the PHQ-9 score. We discovered a significant association between the usage time and the PHQ-9 score (beta=0.0084, p-value=0.010). We conclude that social media usage is a robust marker for depression severity and future research should focus on a better understanding of the underlying causality and potential counter-measures.
Beyond Model Interpretability: On the Faithfulness and Adversarial Robustness of Contrastive Textual Explanations
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Contrastive explanation methods go beyond transparency and address the contrastive aspect of explanations. Such explanations are emerging as an attractive option to provide actionable change to scenarios adversely impacted by classifiers' decisions. However, their extension to textual data is under-explored and there is little investigation on their vulnerabilities and limitations. This work motivates textual counterfactuals by laying the ground for a novel evaluation scheme inspired by the faithfulness of explanations. Accordingly, we extend the computation of three metrics, proximity,connectedness and stability, to textual data and we benchmark two successful contrastive methods, POLYJUICE and MiCE, on our suggested metrics. Experiments on sentiment analysis data show that the connectedness of counterfactuals to their original counterparts is not obvious in both models. More interestingly, the generated contrastive texts are more attainable with POLYJUICE which highlights the significance of latent representations in counterfactual search. Finally, we perform the first semantic adversarial attack on textual recourse methods. The results demonstrate the robustness of POLYJUICE and the role that latent input representations play in robustness and reliability.
Configured Grant for Ultra-Reliable and Low-Latency Communications: Standardization and Beyond
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2022
Year: 2022

Uplink configured Grant allocation has been introduced in 3rd Generation Partnership Project New Radio Release 15. This is beneficial in supporting Ultra-Reliable and Low Latency Communication for industrial communication, a key Fifth Generation mobile communication usage scenario. This scheduling mechanism enables a user with periodic traffic to transmits its data readily and bypasses the control signaling entailed to scheduling requests and scheduling grants and provides low latency access. To facilitate ultra-reliable communication, the scheduling mechanism can allow users to transmit consecutive redundant transmissions in a pre-defined period. However, if the traffic is semi-deterministic, the current standardized configured grant allocation is not equipped to emulate the traffic as the configured grant's period is pre-configured and fixed. This article describes the recent advancements in the standardization process in Release 15 and 16 for configured grant allocation and the prospective solutions to accommodate semi-deterministic traffic behavior for configured grant allocations.
Predicting Dense and Context-aware Cost Maps for Semantic Robot Navigation
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

We investigate the task of object goal navigation in unknown environments where the target is specified by a semantic label (e.g. find a couch). Such a navigation task is especially challenging as it requires understanding of semantic context in diverse settings. Most of the prior work tackles this problem under the assumption of a discrete action policy whereas we present an approach with continuous control which brings it closer to real world applications. We propose a deep neural network architecture and loss function to predict dense cost maps that implicitly contain semantic context and guide the robot towards the semantic goal. We also present a novel way of fusing mid-level visual representations in our architecture to provide additional semantic cues for cost map prediction. The estimated cost maps are then used by a sampling-based model predictive controller (MPC) for generating continuous robot actions. The preliminary experiments suggest that the cost maps generated by our network are suitable for the MPC and can guide the agent to the semantic goal more efficiently than a baseline approach. The results also indicate the importance of mid-level representations for navigation by improving the success rate by 7 percentage points.
Coordinated Science Laboratory 70th Anniversary Symposium: The Future of Computing
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2022
Year: 2022

In 2021, the Coordinated Science Laboratory CSL, an Interdisciplinary Research Unit at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, hosted the Future of Computing Symposium to celebrate its 70th anniversary. CSL's research covers the full computing stack, computing's impact on society and the resulting need for social responsibility. In this white paper, we summarize the major technological points, insights, and directions that speakers brought forward during the Future of Computing Symposium. Participants discussed topics related to new computing paradigms, technologies, algorithms, behaviors, and research challenges to be expected in the future. The symposium focused on new computing paradigms that are going beyond traditional computing and the research needed to support their realization. These needs included stressing security and privacy, the end to end human cyber physical systems and with them the analysis of the end to end artificial intelligence needs. Furthermore, advances that enable immersive environments for users, the boundaries between humans and machines will blur and become seamless. Particular integration challenges were made clear in the final discussion on the integration of autonomous driving, robo taxis, pedestrians, and future cities. Innovative approaches were outlined to motivate the next generation of researchers to work on these challenges. The discussion brought out the importance of considering not just individual research areas, but innovations at the intersections between computing research efforts and relevant application domains, such as health care, transportation, energy systems, and manufacturing.
Decentralized nation, solving the web identity crisis
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2022
Year: 2022

The web of today whether you prefer to call it web 2.0, web 3.0, web 5.0 or even the metaverse is at a critical stage of evolution and challenge, largely centered around its crisis of identity. Like teenagers who cannot assess properly their reason for being and do not seem ready to take responsibility for their actions, we are constantly blaming the very system we are trying to get away from. To truly realize the benefits from innovation and technology, this crisis has to be resolved, not just through tactical solutions but through developments that enhance the sustainability of the web and its benefits. Significant strides are being made in the evolution of digital services enabled by technology, regulation, and the sheer pace of societal change. The journey to the decentralized web is mirroring the convergence of the physical and digital worlds across all economies and is increasingly embracing the digital native world. Technology has provided the foundational platform for individuals and entities to create and manage wealth, potentially without the need for big institutions. Ironically, despite all of the advancements, we are still facing an unprecedented and increasing wealth gap. Clearly, the system is broken, not just around the edges but at the very core of the democratic underpinning of our society. In this whitepaper, we propose how artificial intelligence on blockchain can be used to generate a new class of identity through direct human computer interaction. We demonstrate how this, combined with new perspectives for sustaining community and governance embedded within the use of blockchain technology, will underpin a sustainable solution to protect identity, authorship and privacy at the same time while contributing to restore trust amongst members of a future decentralized nation and hence contribute to solving the web most significant identity crisis.
Election of government ministers
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2022
Year: 2022

The executive branch (the government) is usually not directly elected by the people, but is created by another elected body or person such as the parliament or the president. As a result, its members are not directly accountable to the people, individually or as a group. We propose a scenario where government members are directly elected by the people, and seek to achieve proportional representation in the process. We will present a formal model for the allocation of K offices, each associated with a disjoint set of candidates contesting for that seat. A group of voters provides ballots for each of the offices. Since using simple majority voting for each office independently may result in minority preferences being completely ignored, here we adapt the greedy version of proportional approval voting (GreedyPAV) to our framework. In the article Electing the Executive Branch you can find an in-depth explanation of the model and a demonstration - through computer-based simulations - of how voting for all offices together using this rule overcomes this weakness and upholds the axiom of proportionality. In this article, we will present the implementation of the algorithm (GreedyPAV) proposed by Rutvik Page, Ehud Shapiro, and Nimrod Talmon in the article mentioned above. In addition, we tested our implementation through a survey, the results of which will be presented and analyzed later in the article.
WILD-SCAV: Benchmarking FPS Gaming AI on Unity3D-based Environments
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Recent advances in deep reinforcement learning (RL) have demonstrated complex decision-making capabilities in simulation environments such as Arcade Learning Environment, MuJoCo, and ViZDoom. However, they are hardly extensible to more complicated problems, mainly due to the lack of complexity and variations in the environments they are trained and tested on. Furthermore, they are not extensible to an open-world environment to facilitate long-term exploration research. To learn realistic task-solving capabilities, we need to develop an environment with greater diversity and complexity. We developed WILD-SCAV, a powerful and extensible environment based on a 3D open-world FPS (First-Person Shooter) game to bridge the gap. It provides realistic 3D environments of variable complexity, various tasks, and multiple modes of interaction, where agents can learn to perceive 3D environments, navigate and plan, compete and cooperate in a human-like manner. WILD-SCAV also supports different complexities, such as configurable maps with different terrains, building structures and distributions, and multi-agent settings with cooperative and competitive tasks. The experimental results on configurable complexity, multi-tasking, and multi-agent scenarios demonstrate the effectiveness of WILD-SCAV in benchmarking various RL algorithms, as well as it is potential to give rise to intelligent agents with generalized task-solving abilities. The link to our open-sourced code can be found here https://github.com/inspirai/wilderness-scavenger.
Analysing Donors' Behaviour in Non-profit Organisations for Disaster Resilience: The 2019--2020 Australian Bushfires Case Study
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2022
Year: 2022

With the advancement and proliferation of technology, non-profit organisations have embraced social media platforms to improve their operational capabilities through brand advocacy, among many other strategies. The effect of such social media campaigns on these institutions, however, remains largely underexplored, especially during disaster periods. This work introduces and applies a quantitative investigative framework to understand how social media influence the behaviour of donors and their usage of these platforms throughout (natural) disasters. More specifically, we explore how on-line engagement -- as captured by Facebook interactions and Google search trends -- corresponds to the donors' behaviour during the catastrophic 2019--2020 Australian bushfire season. To discover this relationship, we analyse the record of donations made to the Australian Red Cross throughout this period. Our exploratory study reveals that social media campaigns are effective in encouraging on-line donations made via a dedicated website. We also compare this mode of giving to more regular, direct deposit gifting.
Multi-Agent Automated Machine Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

In this paper, we propose multi-agent automated machine learning (MA2ML) with the aim to effectively handle joint optimization of modules in automated machine learning (AutoML). MA2ML takes each machine learning module, such as data augmentation (AUG), neural architecture search (NAS), or hyper-parameters (HPO), as an agent and the final performance as the reward, to formulate a multi-agent reinforcement learning problem. MA2ML explicitly assigns credit to each agent according to its marginal contribution to enhance cooperation among modules, and incorporates off-policy learning to improve search efficiency. Theoretically, MA2ML guarantees monotonic improvement of joint optimization. Extensive experiments show that MA2ML yields the state-of-the-art top-1 accuracy on ImageNet under constraints of computational cost, e.g., $79.7\%/80.5\%$ with FLOPs fewer than 600M/800M. Extensive ablation studies verify the benefits of credit assignment and off-policy learning of MA2ML.
Artificial Intelligence Nomenclature Identified From Delphi Study on Key Issues Related to Trust and Barriers to Adoption for Autonomous Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2022
Year: 2022

The rapid integration of artificial intelligence across traditional research domains has generated an amalgamation of nomenclature. As cross-discipline teams work together on complex machine learning challenges, finding a consensus of basic definitions in the literature is a more fundamental problem. As a step in the Delphi process to define issues with trust and barriers to the adoption of autonomous systems, our study first collected and ranked the top concerns from a panel of international experts from the fields of engineering, computer science, medicine, aerospace, and defence, with experience working with artificial intelligence. This document presents a summary of the literature definitions for nomenclature derived from expert feedback.
Pseudo-OOD training for robust language models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

While pre-trained large-scale deep models have garnered attention as an important topic for many downstream natural language processing (NLP) tasks, such models often make unreliable predictions on out-of-distribution (OOD) inputs. As such, OOD detection is a key component of a reliable machine-learning model for any industry-scale application. Common approaches often assume access to additional OOD samples during the training stage, however, outlier distribution is often unknown in advance. Instead, we propose a post hoc framework called POORE - POsthoc pseudo-Ood REgularization, that generates pseudo-OOD samples using in-distribution (IND) data. The model is fine-tuned by introducing a new regularization loss that separates the embeddings of IND and OOD data, which leads to significant gains on the OOD prediction task during testing. We extensively evaluate our framework on three real-world dialogue systems, achieving new state-of-the-art in OOD detection.
Table-To-Text generation and pre-training with TabT5
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Encoder-only transformer models have been successfully applied to different table understanding tasks, as in TAPAS (Herzig et al., 2020). A major limitation of these architectures is that they are constrained to classification-like tasks such as cell selection or entailment detection. We present TABT5, an encoder-decoder model that generates natural language text based on tables and textual inputs. TABT5 overcomes the encoder-only limitation by incorporating a decoder component and leverages the input structure with table specific embeddings and pre-training. TABT5 achieves new state-of-the-art results on several domains, including spreadsheet formula prediction with a 15% increase in sequence accuracy, QA with a 2.5% increase in sequence accuracy and data-to-text generation with a 2.5% increase in BLEU.
On the Impact of Temporal Concept Drift on Model Explanations
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Explanation faithfulness of model predictions in natural language processing is typically evaluated on held-out data from the same temporal distribution as the training data (i.e. synchronous settings). While model performance often deteriorates due to temporal variation (i.e. temporal concept drift), it is currently unknown how explanation faithfulness is impacted when the time span of the target data is different from the data used to train the model (i.e. asynchronous settings). For this purpose, we examine the impact of temporal variation on model explanations extracted by eight feature attribution methods and three select-then-predict models across six text classification tasks. Our experiments show that (i)faithfulness is not consistent under temporal variations across feature attribution methods (e.g. it decreases or increases depending on the method), with an attention-based method demonstrating the most robust faithfulness scores across datasets; and (ii) select-then-predict models are mostly robust in asynchronous settings with only small degradation in predictive performance. Finally, feature attribution methods show conflicting behavior when used in FRESH (i.e. a select-and-predict model) and for measuring sufficiency/comprehensiveness (i.e. as post-hoc methods), suggesting that we need more robust metrics to evaluate post-hoc explanation faithfulness.
A Saccaded Visual Transformer for General Object Spotting
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

This paper presents the novel combination of a visual transformer style patch classifier with saccaded local attention. A novel optimisation paradigm for training object models is also presented, rather than the optimisation function minimising class membership probability error the network is trained to estimate the normalised distance to the centroid of labelled objects. This approach builds a degree of transnational invariance directly into the model and allows fast saccaded search with gradient ascent to find object centroids. The resulting saccaded visual transformer is demonstrated on human faces.
Boosting Offline Reinforcement Learning via Data Rebalancing
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) is challenged by the distributional shift between learning policies and datasets. To address this problem, existing works mainly focus on designing sophisticated algorithms to explicitly or implicitly constrain the learned policy to be close to the behavior policy. The constraint applies not only to well-performing actions but also to inferior ones, which limits the performance upper bound of the learned policy. Instead of aligning the densities of two distributions, aligning the supports gives a relaxed constraint while still being able to avoid out-of-distribution actions. Therefore, we propose a simple yet effective method to boost offline RL algorithms based on the observation that resampling a dataset keeps the distribution support unchanged. More specifically, we construct a better behavior policy by resampling each transition in an old dataset according to its episodic return. We dub our method ReD (Return-based Data Rebalance), which can be implemented with less than 10 lines of code change and adds negligible running time. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ReD is effective at boosting offline RL performance and orthogonal to decoupling strategies in long-tailed classification. New state-of-the-arts are achieved on the D4RL benchmark.
Embodying the Glitch: Perspectives on Generative AI in Dance Practice
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2022
Year: 2022

What role does the break from realism play in the potential for generative artificial intelligence as a creative tool? Through exploration of glitch, we examine the prospective value of these artefacts in creative practice. This paper describes findings from an exploration of AI-generated "mistakes" when using movement produced by a generative deep learning model as an inspiration source in dance composition.
Extensible Proxy for Efficient NAS
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Neural Architecture Search (NAS) has become a de facto approach in the recent trend of AutoML to design deep neural networks (DNNs). Efficient or near-zero-cost NAS proxies are further proposed to address the demanding computational issues of NAS, where each candidate architecture network only requires one iteration of backpropagation. The values obtained from the proxies are considered the predictions of architecture performance on downstream tasks. However, two significant drawbacks hinder the extended usage of Efficient NAS proxies. (1) Efficient proxies are not adaptive to various search spaces. (2) Efficient proxies are not extensible to multi-modality downstream tasks. Based on the observations, we design a Extensible proxy (Eproxy) that utilizes self-supervised, few-shot training (i.e., 10 iterations of backpropagation) which yields near-zero costs. The key component that makes Eproxy efficient is an untrainable convolution layer termed barrier layer that add the non-linearities to the optimization spaces so that the Eproxy can discriminate the performance of architectures in the early stage. Furthermore, to make Eproxy adaptive to different downstream tasks/search spaces, we propose a Discrete Proxy Search (DPS) to find the optimized training settings for Eproxy with only handful of benchmarked architectures on the target tasks. Our extensive experiments confirm the effectiveness of both Eproxy and Eproxy+DPS. Code is available at https://github.com/leeyeehoo/GenNAS-Zero.